CEO Explains Why He Reveals Everyone's Salary At His Company

Creating an entirely new kind of corporate culture is difficult.
That's why most companies don't do it. They stick to the
structures to which they are accustomed.

SumAll, a New
York-based company that compiles tools used by small
businesses, has taken extraordinary steps to create a truly
transparent workplace.

Opening the Books

New employees get access to everybody's salary information,
according to CEO Dane Atkinson. In fact, the company's entire
capital structure is open for all workers to peruse. And 10
percent of everybody's ownership is set aside in a non-profit
dedicated to doing social good.

It's a concerted effort by the company to avoid certain abuses
that occur under a traditional structure.

"When you hide your cap table, it's one of the easiest evils to
do in your life," Atkinson says. "You can tell an employee
that they have a huge amount of value and options but you don’t
tell them the total allocation of the company...and it hurts
somebody else."

Atkinson adds that at most companies, someone prints out the list
of salaries and the everyone finds out a few days later. "For the
rest of their careers," Atkinson says, "they have to make a
secret of it and they are disgruntled that someone is making more
money than them, and have no open way of communicating it."

The Trouble With Transparency

Transparency can be rocky at times. Atkinson admits that
it's been a lot more work than he's expected. Differences in
salary or equity have to be explained. During funding rounds,
there's a scramble to figure out what's going on and how all of
the VC relationships work. However, once you get past this
initial stage, people start to demand less information
because there's an attitude of trust and less political strain in
the organization. In that environment, employees find
collaboration much easier.

"Most of our team has refused offers from Google and Facebook and whatnot in the last few
months," Atkinson says. "They are unshakable because once they
get that sense of being part of a family and that openness
in a company, it's really hard to go away from it."

"We just want to be the counterpoint to the corporate culture
that’s out there. We want to help people understand that there
are other ways to build successful organizations," Atkinson says.
"You don’t have to fight over information and be overly
protective. If you are open and you do take this route, it can
work and it’s been working very well for us."